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Remembering a Great Attorney on the Date of His Death: Died 13 March 1938 – Clarence Darrow, an American lawyer, author, and a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Darrow its best known for representing three high-profile clients: Leopold and Loeb for murdering Robert “Bobby” Franks, and John T. Scopes for teaching evolution (the so-called Scopes “Monkey” Trial, during which Darrow opposed William Jennings Bryan).

Some quotes from the work of Clarence Darrow:

“When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.”
“True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”
“Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man.”
“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
“The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.”
“I have lived my life, and I have fought my battles, not against the weak and the poor – anybody can do that – but against power, against injustice, against oppression, and I have asked no odds from them, and I never shall.”

Art for Winter: James Talmadge (American, contemporary)

Below – “Flower Shop”; “Sunset Cruise”; “In My Studio”

Remembering a Nobel Laureate on the Date of His Death: Died 13 March 1975 – Ivo Andric, a Serbian novelist, poet, short story writer, and recipient of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Some quotes from the work of Ivo Andric:

“Of everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad.”
“Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.”
“Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.”
“Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames and smolders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view.”
“To be a man, to have been born without knowing it or wanting it, to be thrown into the ocean of existence, to be obliged to swim, to exist; to have an identity; to resist the pressure and shocks from the outside and the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts – one’s own and those of others – which so often exceed one’s capacities. And what is more, to endure one’s own thoughts about all this: in a word, to be human.”

This Date in Art History: Born 13 March 1593 – Georges de La tour, a French Baroque painter.

Remembering a Writer on the Date of His Death: Died 13 March 1943 – Stephen Vincent Benet, an American poet, short story writer, novelist, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

“Campus Sonnets: May Morning”
by Stephen Vincent Benet

I lie stretched out upon the window-seat
And doze, and read a page or two, and doze,
And feel the air like water on me close,
Great waves of sunny air that lip and beat
With a small noise, monotonous and sweet,
Against the window – and the scent of cool,
Frail flowers by some brown and dew-drenched pool
Possesses me from drowsy head to feet.

This is the time of all-sufficing laughter
At idiotic things some one has done,
And there is neither past nor vague hereafter.
And all your body stretches in the sun
And drinks the light in like a liquid thing;
Filled with the divine languor of late spring.

This Date in Art History: Born 13 March 1864 – Alexej von Jawlensky, a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany..

“The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.”

Below – Crystal Mountain, Dolpo, Nepal; Matthiessen’s great book.

This Date in Art History: Born 12 March 1936 – Patrick Procktor, a British painter.

Remembering a Writer on the Date of His Birth: Born 12 March 1922 – Jack Kerouac, an American novelist and poet.

Some quotes from the work of Jack Kerouac

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.”
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
“Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream.”
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”

This Date in Art History: Died 12 March 1992 – Lucy M. Lewis, a Native American potter.

Pruning the rosebush
the ache of the summer heat
on my shoulders,
the feel of the living stalk
between fingers,
petals – one, another,
then another
seek ground, life
not strong enough to hold on.

Whether it’s blood
or petals, the gift
of time is a thread
I stand on,
feet covered
in the soft
broken soil,
shears meet
the slight resistance
of a living thing.

Contemporary Russian Art: Edward Tabachnik

In the words of one writer, “Edward Tabachnik was born in Russia. Educated from the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) Academy of Arts and Architecture, one of most famous European School of Arts. It is a historic center of Russian Culture. Edward Tabachnik schooling was in both architecture and painting. He has developed a new style, which he calls Romantic Expressionism. Fascination with The Black Hole Theory of The Origin of The World is also reflected in many of his paintings in the form of Singularity through which Time passes, connecting The Past with The Future.”

“But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing.”

Contemporary American Art – Tom Swimm

In the words of one writer, “Tom Swimm began painting at a very young age and developed his self-taught methods by experimenting with various techniques; and by studying the works of Van Gogh, Hopper, Gaugin, Cezanne, and Monet. To seek inspiration, the artist travels extensively, working from photos and sketches that he uses for reference, then he creates his original oils in his studio in California.”

Remembering a Writer on the Date of Her Death: Died 10 March 1948 – Zelda Fitzgerald, an American poet, author, and dancer.

Some quotes from the work of Zelda Fitzgerald:

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
“I am really only myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.”
“I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.”
“Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows.”
“I play the radio and moon about…and dream of Utopias where its always July the 24th 1935, in the middle of summer forever.”
“I don’t want to live, I want to love first and live incidentally.”

This Date in Art History: Born 10 March 1890 – Gakuryo Nakamura, a Japanese painter.

Below – “Egret”; “Bellflower”; “Early Spring”; “Trout”; “Rain.”

Worth a Thousand Words: Table Cape Tulip Farm in Tasmania, Australia.

This Date in Art History: Born 10 March 1922 – Kiyoshi Yamashita, a Japanese painter. (A note: In the words of one writer, “Yamashita was famous for his wanderings throughout Japan, during which he wore only a vest, garnering the nickname ‘The Naked General.’”)

A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands’ spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.
Tactile
definition, however, has not been
totally banished: hanging
tassel by tassel, panicled
foxtail and needlegrass,
dropseed, furred hawkweed,
and last season’s rose-hips
are vested in silenced
chimes of the finest,
clearest sea-crystal.
Opacity
opens up rooms, a showcase
for the hueless moonflower
corolla, as Georgia
O’Keefe might have seen it,
of foghorns; the nodding
campanula of bell buoys;
the ticking, linear
filigree of bird voices.

American Art – Hamilton Hamilton (1847-1928)

Hamilton Hamilton was one of the greatest painters of America’s Western frontier – especially Colorado.

“We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.” – Zelda Fitzgerald, an American author.

“Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamberpot into a bower of aromatic perfume.”

Australian Art – Tom Roberts (1856-1931)

Tom Roberts was a British-born painter and a key member of the Australian Impressionist movement.

Art for Winter – Part I of IV: Michael Summers (American, contemporary)

Below – “Catnip”; “Elephant Parade”; “Family Band”

Remembering a Writer on the Date of His Birth: Born 8 March 1859 – Kenneth Grahame, a Scottish writer and the author of “The Wind in the Willows”

Some quotes from the work of Kenneth Grahame:

“Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.”
“All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.”
“Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, Those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way.”
“The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday as I moved Southwards week by week, easily, lazily, lingering as long as I dared, but always heeding the call!”
“Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing!”
“Today, to him gazing south with a new-born need stirring in his heart, the clear sky over their long low outline seemed to pulsate with promise; today, the unseen was everything. the unknown the only real fact of life.”
“Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes!’ ‘Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new! Then some day, some day long hence, jog home here if you will, when the cup has been drained and the play has been played, and sit down by your quiet river with a store of goodly memories for company.”

Remembering a Writer on the Date of His Death: Died 8 March 1941 – Sherwood Anderson, an American novelist and short story writer.
Sherwood Anderson created at least two literary classics: the short story cycle “Winesburg, Ohio” and the short story “The Egg.”

Some quotes from the work of Sherwood Anderson:

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.”
“In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers”
“The fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn’t that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees.”
“People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast.”
“The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”
“Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.”

This Date in Art History: Born 8 March 1945 – Anselm Keifer, a German painter and sculptor.

Below- “The Evening of All Days, the Day of All Evenings”; “Jakobs Traum”; “Velimir Chlebnikov”; “Marie-Antoinette”; Untitled; “The Women of the Revolution.”

A Poem for Today

“The Smile on the Face of a Kouros”
by William Bronk

This boy, of course, was dead, whatever that
might mean. And nobly dead. I think we should feel
he was nobly dead. He fell in battle, perhaps,
and this carved stone remembers him
not as he may have looked, but as if to define
the naked virtue the stone describes as his.
One foot is forward, the eyes look out, the arms
drop downward past the narrow waist to hands
hanging in burdenless fullness by the heavy flanks.
The boy was dead, and the stone smiles in his death
lightening the lips with the pleasure of something achieved:
an end. To come to an end. To come to death
as an end. And coming, bring there intact, the full
weight of his strength and virtue, the prize with which
his empty hands are full. None of it lost,
safe home, and smile at the end achieved.
Now death, of which nothing as yet – or ever – is known,
leaves us alone to think as we want of it,
and accepts our choice, shaping the life to the death.
Do we want an end? It gives us; and takes what we give
and keeps it; and has, this way, in life itself,
a kind of treasure house of comely form
achieved and left with death to stay and be
forever beautiful and whole, as if
to want too much the perfect, unbroken form
were the same as wanting death, as choosing death
for an end. There are other ways; we know the way
to make the other choice for death: unformed
or broken, less than whole, puzzled, we live
in a formless world. Endless, we hope for no end.
I tell you death, expect no smile of pride
from me. I bring you nothing in my empty hands.

American Art – Gary Swanson (1941-2010)

In the words of one writer, “Gary Swanson chronicled the wild kingdom since he was a boy. Today his masterful images are sought after by connoisseurs of wildlife art worldwide. Indeed, to view these paintings is to behold art that comes alive before your eyes. Gary Robert Swanson was born and raised on a small farm just south of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Swanson family migrated to Southern California in the mid 50’s, and it was there that Gary began his career with the wild creatures of the world.”